THIS MORNING: Paramount wraps up its Gulf-backed WBD takeover + IRH circles Irish titanium miner Kenmare Resources again

Good morning, everyone. Today’s edition tells a story of ambitious aims, as Abu Dhabi sets a bold food security target and state-backed firms eye acquisitions in everything from mining to tech platforms.

The UAE aims to more than double its production of basic food commodities to 70% by 2040, which is part of a strategy that also includes slashing farm water usage. The war and Hormuz disruptions pushed food security higher up the agenda this year, but raising home production from 30% to 70% is easier said than done — not to mention the serious private investment it will take.

It’s also a busy day on the M&A front, as Paramount's Gulf-backed takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery makes it over the finish line, having survived legal challenges and doled out concessions. Meanwhile, BlueFive is buying into Indonesian shariah fund manager Majoris.

PLUS- More investment could be in the pipeline, as Adia reportedly eyes anchoring a USD 1 bn continuation fund built around ByteDance and IRH makes a non-binding proposal to take over Irish titanium miner Kenmare.

Skydance is over the line

After objections, delays, and some serious capital commitments, Paramount’s Gulf-backed takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery is here. In a statement, Paramount announced the creation of Skydance — the company formed following the completion of the takeover and subsequent merger. Shares started trading on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday under the SKYD ticker, and Warner Bros. Discovery shares stopped trading on the Nasdaq yesterday.

A recap of how we got here: The takeover has been beset by legal challenges like an antitrust suit from 12 US states which claimed the acquisition would harm competition, cinemas, television distributors, and audiences, as well as a separate challenge brought by the Writers Guild of America. It also had to offer assurances to secure the green light from UK regulators and end its distribution tie-up with Universal in Europe to get EU approval.

The USD bn funding machine: Paramount had priced in USD 52 bn in bonds and loans to finance the takeover, and WBD shareholders got around USD 31 per share. Alongside that debt, L’imad, PIF, and QIA backed the takeover by putting up USD 24 bn in equity, as part of a USD 47 bn equity investment for the transaction. After closing, L’imad will hold 12.8% of Paramount's non-voting equity, behind PIF’s 15.1%.

The new creation: The merger has brought together the two heavyweight film studios, two streaming services, a host of cable networks including CNN and HBO, as well as a significant catalog of franchises. Skydance is also set to produce a minimum of 30 films per year.

Etisalat is back

UAE telecoms group e& is dropping its four-year-old name and reverting to Etisalat, the telco said in a filing (pdf) to the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX) yesterday. The announcement was made on its 50th anniversary. The filing doesn’t say whether the e& sub-brands (e& enterprise, e& money, e& life) or the ADX ticker will change too, or when the switch takes effect.

The e& name was built for a strategy the company has since moved away from. The 2022 rebrand was meant to signal a shift from telco to a global technology investment conglomerate. The “and” stood in for everything beyond the phone network: fintech, enterprise, and stakes in operators abroad. That ambition has narrowed. In July, e& agreed to sell its entire stake in Vodafone Group for USD 5.95 bn to refocus on its core business. The new focus is on connectivity and the digital infrastructure that AI runs on. A name that means “connections” fits that story better, the firm said.

The infrastructure push comes with a target: more than 500 Tbps of international connectivity capacity by 2030, state news agency Wam reports. That is over 25x what the company has today.

Adia to back ByteDance?

The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (Adia) is in talks to anchor a USD 1 bn continuation fund built around a stake in Chinese tech giant and TikTok owner ByteDance, Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter. The sovereign fund is looking to put in USD 400-600 mn, and Coller EQT another USD 100-200 mn. Neither the final size nor the investor lineup has been settled.

What we know: Primavera Capital, a long-time ByteDance backer, is moving its ByteDance shares and a smaller Ant Group stake out of an eight-year-old fund and into the new vehicle. Together the two stakes are worth USD 1.5 bn at net asset value. Primavera is selling them at about a 30% markdown, the business information service says.

Why it matters: The markdown gets Adia into one of the world’s most sought-after private tech companies cheaply. The acquisition implies a ByteDance valuation of USD 400-450 bn, well below the USD 600 bn at which Primavera’s current fund marks it. It is still up from the roughly USD 370 bn valuation in a similar continuation vehicle by HSG (formerly Sequoia Capital China) earlier this year.

Why a continuation fund? Continuation funds let private equity firms hold onto their best long-term assets while giving their existing investors the option to sell. They’ve grown in popularity in recent years as exits become more difficult: transactions hit USD 65 bn globally in 1H 2026, according to Evercore.

IRH circles Kenmare again

Abu Dhabi’s International Resources Holdings (IRH) has made a non-binding proposal to acquire Dublin-listed Irish titanium miner Kenmare Resources, according to a company statement (pdf). Discussions are ongoing, with IRH given until 17 November to either announce a firm offer or walk away. Kenmare stressed that there is no certainty an agreement will materialize or on what terms.

And IRH has looked here before: The Irish Times reports that the Abu Dhabi group considered a bid for Kenmare two years ago. Since then, Kenmare’s shares have fallen more than 50% from their 2024 highs and 43% over the past year, leaving the company valued at about GBP 163 mn at Monday’s close.

The catch is Mozambique: Kenmare’s Moma mine produces about 6% of global titanium minerals, according to the Irish Times, but the company is still negotiating a new royalty agreement with the government as titanium prices remain under pressure. The paper says ilmenite prices are now in their fourth year of decline, while Kenmare’s mineral-product revenue fell 16% in 1H. Industry observers cited by the paper said both the commodity cycle and the unresolved Mozambique agreement could complicate any offer.

IN CONTEXT- A Kenmare agreement would deepen IRH’s already aggressive African mining push. The group bought control of Zambia’s Mopani Copper Mines and later agreed to buy 56% of Alphamin Resources for USD 367 mn, giving it exposure to copper and tin. But that expansion has not been frictionless: Zambia’s state miner accused IRH last week of breaching the Mopani agreements and threatened arbitration.

UAE enlists more defense help from US

The US State Department has approved a possible USD 1.04 bn sale of up to 10k Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System-II guidance kits to the UAE, according to a statement. The package also includes high-explosive warheads, rocket motors, and proximity fuzes, in both air-to-air and air-to-ground configurations. The sale would strengthen the UAE’s self-defense capability and its interoperability with US forces, the State Department said. Separately, it approved a USD 400 mn sale of Patriot Missile repair and return services to Kuwait, according to another statement.

Why it matters: The kits turn cheap unguided rockets into laser-guided munitions that can take down drones. That spares the UAE from firing costly interceptor missiles at comparatively cheap targets, a gap the Iran war exposed across Gulf air defenses. The order is almost 7x the size of the 1.5k kits the US approved for the UAE in May.

It’s also the latest in a series of signs that the UAE and the US are deepening their defense ties. After the agreement in May, the US Commerce Department widened the export door for the UAE and included defense as an area for cooperation under the same agreement that let it buy advanced American chips.

What’s next: Unlike May’s emergency transaction, this one goes through the standard congressional review before contracts can be signed. BAE Systems is the prime contractor.

TII cracks Emirati dialect

Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII) has launched Falcon-Emirati, a language model built for the Emirati dialect, alongside two other Arabic AI models, according to a press release (pdf). Falcon-Emirati is a 7 bn-parameter model trained on native Emirati content and heritage material to pick up the dialect’s idioms, expressions, and cultural references. It scored 84.83% on Alyah, a native Emirati Arabic benchmark, beating every open-source Arabic and multilingual model TII tested it against, the institute says. It will be available through TII’s Falcon Chat platform.

The other two cover speech and documents:

• Falcon-ASR transcribes Emirati Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. On Emirati speech, it beat a 30 bn-parameter multimodal model, according to TII;
• Falcon-OCR-Arabic pulls Arabic text, tables, and structured content from images and documents.

IN CONTEXT- A shortage of native Arabic training data has historically left LLMs weak on dialect nuance. A model trained mostly on formal Arabic can understand every word of an Emirati sentence and still miss what it means. TII is one of several UAE players trying to close that gap. G42 and du have both rolled out Arabic LLMs for specific uses such as customer service and telecoms.

CEPA with the EAEU comes into force

The UAE’s trade agreement with the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) came into force yesterday, giving UAE exporters preferential access to Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia, according to a statement. It covers about 86% of tariff lines and roughly 96% of the value of current trade between the two sides. The agreement is goods-only: it cuts or removes customs duties and simplifies customs procedures, but doesn’t touch services or investment.

The target is about USD 50 bn in annual trade by 2032, up from USD 33.6 bn in non-oil trade last year. That 2025 figure was up 16% y-o-y and more than four times the 2021 level. Momentum has cooled since, though: non-oil trade rose just 6.2% y-o-y to USD 14.3 bn in 1H 2026.

Why it matters: The UAE mostly trades with the bloc as a middleman. Of last year’s USD 33.6 bn, USD 17.8 bn was imports from EAEU countries and USD 13.7 bn was re-exports. That leaves only around USD 2 bn of UAE-made non-oil exports. Lower tariffs should help re-exporters and logistics players most, along with the handful of UAE manufacturers that sell into the bloc. Foreign Trade Minister Thani Al Zeyoudi singled out food security, agriculture, automotive, and precious metals as sectors set to benefit.

BACKGROUND- The agreement was originally signed in Minsk in June 2025 during a visit by Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed.

Saving for a rainy strait

The UAE and Saudi Arabia want to keep more of their crude on the Asian side of Hormuz. The two are expected to back a Japan-led push to build bigger oil reserves across Asia at the Asia Zero Emission Community (AZEC) ministerial meeting in the Philippines on Thursday, Nikkei reports. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi would supply more crude and could offer emergency priority access. Japan would fund the stockpiles through its USD 10 bn Power Asia program.

It’s a bigger version of agreements already in place: Both have asked Japan to expand their existing Japan-based crude inventories roughly tenfold from around 8 mn barrels each. Aramco also holds 5.3 mn barrels in South Korea, with Seoul holding emergency purchase rights.

Most of Asia needs the cover: Japan holds more than 200 days of oil reserves.Thailand had 61 days as of March, the Philippines 53, and Vietnam just 30. Saudi Arabia is already cutting prices to gain back Asian buyers, at as much as a USD 5/bbl discount to Oman-Dubai, Reuters reports, even as Gulf exports return back to around pre-war levels, it reported elsewhere.

Data point

AED 5.74 tn — this was the value of the UAE banking sector’s total assets at the end of August, up 1.3% m-o-m, according to the Central Bank of the UAE’s latest monetary and banking developments report (pdf). Credit grew twice as fast, rising 2.6% — or AED 72.4 bn — to AED 2.87 tn, as domestic lending increased 2.8% to AED 2.27 tn, and foreign credit gained 1.6% to AED 602.6 bn.

Consumers did most of the heavy lifting: Lending to individuals jumped 5.6% m-o-m, or AED 34.4 bn, making it the biggest driver of domestic credit growth. Corporate credit increased 2.4%, or AED 22.8 bn, while government lending was up 2.8%, or AED 7.2 bn.

Deposits didn’t quite keep up: Total bank deposits grew 0.7% to AED 3.53 tn, with resident deposits up 1.0% to AED 3.23 tn. Private-sector deposits increased 0.7% to AED 2.36 tn, while government deposits jumped 3.5% to AED 461.1 bn, with each contributing 0.5 percentage points to resident deposit growth.

PSA

WEATHER- The mercury is rising back up again today, reaching highs of 42°C in both Abu Dhabi and Dubai, before cooling to 31°C in Dubai and 30°C in Abu Dhabi overnight, according to our favorite weather app.

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The big story abroad

AI and rocket player SpaceX is in the market for USD 40 bn in financing to snap up Nvidia chips, Financial Times reports, citing sources familiar with the matter. The fundraising effort, which Apollo Global Management is expected to lead, seeks about USD 10 bn in bank loans and USD 30 bn in investment-grade debt, and is expected to close next year. Bond group Pimco was among a small number of lenders in talks to fund the blockbuster chip purchase.

An AI-led tech rally has rocketed the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite to new closing records yesterday, despite the Fed's first rate hike in three years and a months-long war that has pushed oil to USD 100 a barrel. A handful of tech giants are doing the heavy lifting, with Nvidia hitting a new all-time high after gaining 4.5% over the past week and Meta climbing 24% since mid-August, while most other stocks are falling.

More than 250k people rallied across France yesterday to back high school students demanding more education funding, according to government figures. Police used tear gas and detained nearly 500 people, and some student groups have called for new protests tomorrow.

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